Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Minority Threat And Police Strength From 1980 To 2000: A Fixed-Effects Analysis Of Nonlinear And Interactive Effects In Large U.S. Cities, Stephanie L. Kent, David Jacobs

Sociology & Criminology Faculty Publications

Many studies have assessed threat theory by investigating the relationships between the size of minority populations and police strength. Yet these investigations analyzed older data with cross-sectional designs. This study uses a fixed-effects panel design to detect nonlinear and interactive relationships between minority presence and the per capita number of police in large U.S. cities in the last three census years. The findings show that the relationship between racial threat and the population-corrected number of police officers has recently become considerably stronger. In accord with theoretically based expectations, tests for interactions show that segregated cities with larger African American populations …